In our latest concise guides we look at good habits when photographing from a game drive vehicle.

If you want to get the best shots from a photo safari you need to get your game drive head on.  Wildlife-rich destinations and switched on, photo-savvy guides will get you a long way, but to maximise each, often fleeting, opportunity you need to be switched on, like your camera, at all times.

Packing your gear away assuming the drive’s over might seem sensible when the light’s dropping fast, especially if you’ve already got some stuff in the bag you’re pleased with, but what if you run into a leopard? Okay so that may be a fairly obvious point to make, but there’s lots of dos and don’ts on game drives that will stack the odds in your favour.

We’ve been photographing from vehicles in Africa – whether self-driving or with guides – throughout our photographic careers and we’ve learned to our cost that nature hardly ever repeats herself. Fluff that single, magic moment and you’ll struggle to find it again, in the same perfect light and position.

Good routines on game drives will grant you greater success. So here are some of the habits you can form to boost your chances or at least ensure you don’t repeat the simple mistakes we made when starting out.

*We’ll look at spotlighting after dark on game drives in a separate tutorial

Our top tips for game drives

• Don’t overburden yourself with extra kit you won’t need. Pare gear down to the essentials to aid speedy access to your camera at all times. Check before your drive how close you’re likely to get to subjects. On reserves where you can go off road, for example, you can often approach wildlife quite closely. Do you really need a cumbersome super-telephoto that might restrict your movement? Would a zoom be more compact and manageable? If you can get near, perhaps a wide-angle lens for dynamic close-ups of the mega-fauna might be a good idea.
• Be ready to photograph from the get-go. That impressive male lion could be under your nose as soon as you depart so check your settings and have a camera at hand before heading off. Given your morning drive will begin just before sun-up make sure you start your session with sufficient ISO and shutter speed for photography in low-light situations.
• Pay extra special attention to photographic possibilities in the first 30 minutes of your morning game drive, and the last 30 minutes of your afternoon when the light will be at its most interesting and the animals at their enigmatic best. The best shots lie in the margins of the light.
• We mainly shoot on aperture priority for maximum speed, control and flexibility and routinely start game drives with our ISO set to at least 1600. We’ll increase that if we need more speed, depending on what we see early on, and then gradually drop it as increasing light levels allow (or increase it again if we’re doing flight shots of fast-moving small birds and need tons of speed). Some photographers prefer auto-ISO and manual setting of shutter speed and aperture, which can also work well.
• Be ready for action at all times. Action can come out of nowhere and is often over as soon as it starts. It helps to remove shoulder straps from cameras (they get caught up on things and slow you down) and leave lens caps off. Keep an eye on settings as you go so you can achieve speeds of 1/1000 sec and more to freeze the moment just in case a raptor, for example, suddenly takes off or flies by.
• Apart from a few specific situations on our safaris we don’t like to be too prescriptive about camera settings. We prefer to provide pointers and options as a situation evolves so our guests can learn and choose what to do according to what they want to achieve. But as a general rule of thumb on drives we aim to shoot fairly wide open at apertures from, say, f5.6 to f8 for speed and to keep backgrounds nicely out of focus. But we always keep things under review.
• Be aware, however, that you’ll often need more depth of field for some subjects, particularly groups or tight in close-ups taken with a telephoto. It’s a common mistake to skimp on DoF and we have had to delete many images in the past because we’ve underestimated this. If a situation allows you can always stop down incrementally to cover yourself until you’re experienced enough to judge it as you photograph.

• Take care to focus on the eye or head of your subject. Look for strong eye contact, catchlights in the eyes and pricked, erect ears before you press the shutter release. Keep backgrounds simple and try to isolate subjects from their backgrounds or from other members of their group or herd.
• Game drives are thrilling adventures and it’s easy to forget how your camera’s set up in the heat of the moment. If you change your ISO, use exposure compensation, switch to manual focus or change your in-camera white balance for one subject make sure you reset your camera afterwards or you might end up fouling up your shots of the next.
• Check your battery charge and frames remaining frequently and don’t leave it too late to change cards. The last thing you want is to have to switch cards in the middle of a great photo opportunity. It’s a good idea to change cards in a quiet moment before your card is full.
• Don’t chimp too much on game drives – you might miss a great shot while you’re admiring your work. It’s good to check exposure using histograms or blinkies in challenging light, but don’t take your eye off the game for too long.
• Use your ears as well as your eyes when looking for wildlife. Game drives are sensory experiences. As you move through the bush you’ll pick up lots of different scents and smells. Tune in to your surroundings for clues about potential subjects. The alarm calls of antelopes and birds might give you a hint there’s a predator nearby.
• Always try to critique what your eyes are seeing and don’t let the excitement of the occasion blind you to what’s actually there. That group of zebra, for example, might look great at first glance, especially if they’re your first on African soil, but did you notice the tree branches sticking out of their heads or the fact their legs were cut off by the horizon?  Wait for your subjects to move into a better position, move your vehicle for a fresh viewpoint or accept defeat and move on if you still can’t make a decent picture.
• Don’t linger over a good subject in bad light that’s unworkable.
• Don’t waste time and good light on a poor sighting.  
• Do listen to your guide. They know the location and the subjects and can help to get you great shots if you work with them and bow to their insight.
• Keep noise levels down – some animals that are totally relaxed with engine noise are very sensitive to human voices.
• If you need to move position, say shifting seats, do so slowly and NEVER stand up in a game vehicle at a sighting or when on the move. Breaking the outline of the vehicle will see off many subjects.
• Do wait with an unfolding situation where there’s potential for something really special to happen – even if your gamble doesn’t pay off this time it will the next. We once left a cheetah under a tree because we decided it wasn’t going to hunt only to return an hour later to find it had made its kill right after we left and right by where we were. You don’t make a mistake like that twice.
• We’re not big advocates of ‘drive-by shooting’ – by that we mean grabbing scattergun shots of every animal and bird encountered on game drives. Rather look for quality over quantity and get one or two stand-out shots from a developing session than a bunch of hastily captured stuff on the run that turn out so-so.
• There are times when you need to shoot first and ask questions later – if you cross paths with a shy, elusive or rare creature you don’t often see, or stumble upon a leopard that’s on the move. This is the time we advocate clicking without hesitation rather than waiting for perfection.  Bear in mind there’s a very brief moment, as soon as a shy subject clocks your presence, when it will fix its gaze on you intently before it decides what to do next; which is usually to spook and run. That brief pause is the tiny gap where you’ll get an alert-looking shot. On the odd occasion a shy subject hangs around and tolerates your presence; that’s the time to finesse things for an even better image.
• Don’t panic if things kick-off and you worry you’re not getting things right. Just keep shooting, ask for help and never forget to enjoy your experience of Africa in the wild and up close!

Female leopard, Kgalagadi, South Africa

Be ready for anything at all times and make sure you have lots of speed in hand so you can pull off a sharp shot even in the excitement of seeing a beautiful big cat emerging from the shadows into the golden bands of light at sunrise.

Canon EOS 5D IV, EF100-400mm + 1.4x extender, 1/400 sec, f/8, ISO 500